Plenilune

by Jennifer Freitag

  “Fox?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t understand. What is all this—this discontent—about the Overlord? Is he a sort of king, then? And if they do not like Rupert, why can’t they choose someone else?”

  “Would that they could!” the fox laughed harshly. “No one wants Rupert, but it isn’t as though anyone actually dares say ‘no’ to him on the matter.”

  She recalled the dark, flashing looks that could spring at the least provocation into the man’s eyes, the looks of murder, the looks which reckoned nothing of the worth of human life, only power, only himself. No, no one would want him, but no one would dare say nay. Only she had dared, in her small, petty, ineffectual way: and he had shown her up quick enough and made her obedient.

  But the fox had not finished. He seemed to deliberate for a few moments, looking away with the lamplight glassy in his eyes, as if to find the right words. His countenance was unusually doleful. “The Overlord,” he began at last, consideringly, “is more than just a man with a title. He is more than a king or a mere strategist or a high judge presiding over quarrels.” He looked round at her, light breaking up against and throwing itself off the quicksilver mirror of his eyes. His voice was low and urgent, with a shiningness about it that made Margaret’s heart quicken.

  “The Overlord is Plenilune itself. He is its heart, he is its soul: he is the dark lodestone that lies at the core of everything.”

  “A dark lodestone indeed,” said Margaret after a brief, heavy quiet, “would Rupert be.”

  The fox grinned up at her, all his little white teeth showing. “A dark lodestone indeed, which cannot find true north. It is a good joke,” he added, his body jigging to the quickness of his foxy breathing, “don’t you think?”

  But the joke rang hollow with Margaret. With renewed vigour the inexplicable pangs in her chest returned, twisting upward into her brain images of the fells and the snow-hushed pine-woods, the glimpses of deep black lakes round the spurs of the hills. She saw the mews full of hawks and the kennels full of hounds. She heard the echo of proud Blue-bottle Glass declaring his power to the world. No, no one would want Rupert. Not even Plenilune.

  And her heart ached because of that.

  “No,” he said musingly, half to himself. “I see it is no more humorous to you than it is to me.” Suddenly his voice rasped like a sword being drawn. “If only I—the bastard— …Forgive me.”

  She put her forehead in her palm. “For what? It is only what I say to myself a thousand times a day. I am n-not myself anymore. My country and its ways have no place among these people. I must find my own way—or learn theirs, as the case seems to be. I do not think I will ever see home again. I do not—I d-do not—I do not know if I want to.”

  The cool pad of a paw touched her knee again, cold through her gown where the robe had slipped off and the fabric was thin. “I think we have talked too long,” said her companion, “and we are too young to find the humorous transience in things. You had better go to bed or we will be opening one of these bottles and drowning our enormous sorrows and all the sorrows of the Honours together, you and I. I can’t imagine drunkenness becomes you.”

  “So we will drown things in sleep?”

  He smiled. “For now, and later—did I not say?—we will look for a break in the wall.” He slipped off the crate and walked forward, pulling her after him through the pool of lamplight toward the base of the cellar stair where the dark flowed down and faded away. “You remembered and you came, and I think you will remember and come again. I—” he flashed her an apologetic look over his shoulder. “I get lonesome down here.”

  “And I,” she heard herself saying. “I get lonesome up there.”

  “It is a rummy world.”

  She had hoped, a little, that he would go up with her, but her hope had no real foundation and broke up quickly when he sat down, as he had before, on the dirt floor to watch her go. Somehow that did not matter so much now, nor did she hate him so desperately for his cowardice. She let sleeping foxes lie and went on alone. But at the foot of the stair she turned back for one thing more.

  “You know, I think I asked God for comfort. I asked it badly, because I know God badly, but he was the only one to ask. I was not sure he would answer, but I never expected him to send it in the form of a fox.”

  The fox shifted forward as if pulled by her words, but he did not rise. “Mayhap you are asleep,” he coaxed sibilantly, “and I am but a dream from beyond the gates of horn…Good night, Margaret.”

  “Good night, fox.”

  13 | The White Ones

  The morning was bright and cold. There had been no snow in Seescardale: the land lay jewel-cut and clear beneath a fair winter sky and the winds, sharp and incessant, blew down from the north between the fells and burned Margaret’s face as she stepped out of the house into the mocking sunlight. The thin, pale sunlight which promised warmth and gave none, and the silvery, rushing winds were more companionable to her than the two men she had slipped away from. She had left them in the withdrawing room, talking quietly and animatedly to each other about things that eluded her hearing. Restless and bored and disliking the company of them both, Margaret had got away at the earliest possible moment.

  With one hand on her shawl wrapped about her head, her other gathering her skirts about her ankles, she ran across the yard and ducked out into the face of the wind. The roses bunching and climbing up the yard walls were roaring like a storm-tossed sea of silver and green. The windbreak across the pasture was struggling at its job: the wind was in everything, roaring, thundering, buffeting, drowning out everything but the water-droplet notes of a blackbird who was perched in one elm, high up, where the wind was tossing it about with reckless abandon.

  She found old Hobden planting bulbs. She had not realized that she had been looking for him until her scattered wandering with and against the wind brought her to the end of a bit of low, sloping earthwork and she found him on his knees, hands almost black with loam, digging holes for the plants. She watched him for a moment, waiting for him to look round. When he kept on silently working and did not seem to notice even her racing shadow, she folded up and sat down in the sunlit lee of the earthwork, the wind finally cut off and the light finally feeling warm on her skin.

  “Tha’s back,” said old Hobden, glancing up once from under his badger brows.

  “I’m back.”

  He went back to working. His gnarled, walnut-coloured hands with their blunt fingernails encrusted with dirt worked deftly at the pale bulbs, and carried each one tenderly as if it were a baby. Margaret, with her head back against the slope of earthwork, watched him blindly for a few minutes. A weariness pulled at her body—and no wonder. She had slept through odd hours and well into midmorning, and the past three days from which she had emerged had taxed her more than she had at first realized. In the sun-warmed lee of the earthworks with the wind rushing overhead, the gentle slope of Marenové and the whole of Seescardale spread out before her under a curl of earth, and old Hobden grumbling good-naturedly over his bulbs beside her, Margaret sat back and revelled in her weariness. The sun felt good; the open air blew cleanly through her veins.

  She tucked her skirts around her legs and drew her knees up. From the depths of her pocket she withdrew Skander’s book, the faintest twinge of guilt quickly flickering away with the rushing light. She felt the darkened leather cover and pale inner lining with the soft of her thumb. It was curiously lovely for being such an old, battered thing—clearly it had been restitched at least once—but as her hand fell flat upon the cover of it, she felt intuitively that it was the loveliness of souls that made the little, simple thing shine out with a beauty that frightened her. And it did frighten her: what was in this innocuous little book that had prompted a reckless, wrinkled old woman to steal it from a respectable land-owner and hide it for Margaret in her own bag?

  She supposed she was about to find out, but as she twisted her hand, sliding it under the cover to turn i
t back, she stopped, frozen, knowing in that moment that she was at a cross-roads. If she turned back that cover and began reading, she would never be able to unlearn what she had read, nor would she have a choice to not act on whatever she learned. For a moment the world was devoid of Rupert and Skander, of crowns and sceptres, of bitterness and strife. It was only Plenilune and herself and Songmartin’s little book. She stood upon a strange brink with them, knowing the choice lay before her, knowing she had already made it.

  She turned back the cover. The wind, changing course, roared up the earthwork and fluttered the pages under her hand. Old Hobden grumbled beside her but she hardly heard him. Under a flurry of sunlight and soft flecks of dirt, Margaret began scanning through the pages, idly, reading pieces here and there as they flashed out at her. She buried deeper into the side of the earthwork, surrounded by the clean smell of winter air, the rich, dark scent of overturned dirt, and the smell, like no other, of old pages.

  “It is a mistake to suppose,” said Songmartin in one paragraph, “that mankind, though lost, has little to no understanding of virtue. On the contrary, he understands it almost better than the elect, for he feels the empty shape of it in his soul, the place where it ought to be; he feels the coldness of its receding shadow, knowing that no other thing can warm him as it can—and knowing that, if he could, he would be glad to be cold in its company than warm in the embrace of vice. Few men love vice: they fill the void inside them with their own pleasures, their own vices, and lie to themselves, calling these things virtues, though even they do not believe their own fantasies. They long for virtue as a man longs for his lover’s face, knowing they will never grasp it back. They are encompassed by its shadow as the Great Blind Dragon encompasses Plenilune with its power—”

  Margaret started back and read the words again. Other words, despair, restlessness of the soul, groping after God, jostled on her vision, but the nonchalant and incredible words the Great Blind Dragon leapt off the yellowed page at her. What on earth—she pressed the heel of her hand to her temple as the treacherous phrase escaped again. Who was this, what was this impossible creature and this impossible power? She looked up, blinking through the smudge of black on her vision, pulling Seescardale into focus once more. In this weird but forward world, surely no one believed in dragons. There were no such things as dragons.

  But then, there were also no such things as talking foxes.

  The landscape turned alien under her eye; the grass under her hand burned cold. Even old Hobden, the most mundane and familiar of all images, twisted and looked strange. Do not touch him, she fought against her first impulse. If he does not vanish, he may bite you.

  Slowly she got up, her fingers digging into the grass on the curve of earthwork to keep the wind from tearing her away. She meant to leave quietly, stealing away like the mystical thing she had seen in the Glassdale wood, but old Hobden caught her movement and looked up, rocking back on the balls of his feet, shoving the dirt out of his eyes with the back of his hand.

  “I was never for book-learnin’ neither,” he said moodily. “Not one to sit tidy and muddle over words. Best be gettin’ about and workin’. Good for the blood. Too much book-learnin’ makes the blood go sour.”

  “I suppose so,” said Margaret in a white voice. Then, to herself, I want my horse. I want to ride away, just to get away. Why am I so terrified? What has changed? Why does that woman scare us all like this?

  What is this weird providence?

  She found herself walking instead, leaving old Hobden behind, caught up in the full power of the wind as she went down the grassy slopes toward the road and the pastureland beyond. The Marenové trees were almost all bare, grey-brown, tossing images over a tawny turf. She was exposed in that open ground, but the power of the wind was the only thing greater than her inexplicable fear and she walked out in it, putting the house at her back, heedless of her own weariness and the inadequacy of her shoes. She walked to the lane, careful not to think, and made her way down the sodden path under the whirling branches until the lane met the road. There she turned southward, walking in and out of patchy sunlight, listening to the gurgle of a blackbird, the distant whistle of a shepherd, and the answering bark of a sheepdog. Autumn lay like beaten copper over the land, beaten by the wind, enamelled by the faience-blue sky. She walked the narrow edge of a blade of wind and wondered what was holding this curious world together. She had never asked, no more than she had asked about earth. There had been the reality of Plenilune to deal with at first, and after that she had managed to take things in stride. Now, through a few black bars of lettering, a dead theologian from an alien world had managed to thrust her awareness down, like a spade into dark loam, into a deeper world where things could be felt but not touched, believed but never seen.

  She stopped at the end of the bend of the road and looked back, up the howl of wind, up the roaring avenue of scarlet barberry. The empty hole of conscience, a dragon, a man who could do magic, a fox that could talk…They all seemed strangely thin and pale in the face of that wind, no more than a few tossing red leaves, small under her eye, and she smiled self-deprecatingly as they blew past her, into her, and settled in the stillness of her mind.

  I will ask Rupert to let Centurion and his siblings stop here on their way to the University. I must learn some kind of hospitality, and Centurion…he was kind. Though God knows I loath kindness just now.

  She retraced her steps and blew in at the front door of the house, wind-swept and wild-looking. She caught a glimpse of herself in the hall clock, moon-coloured, her hair like a falcon’s fury. Then her gaze shifted and she saw the clock-hands: it was past noon. Her stomach called out to the clock. Putting her book into her pocket she strode to the dining room doorway and looked in.

  Rupert was alone. He was sitting back with an empty plate pushed away, soiled utensils on the side of it, surrounded by a collection of papers that were covered in curious lettering, circles, and squares. He was holding a book in one hand, deep into its contents, but he looked up as she appeared.

  “You missed Malbrey,” he said without preamble. “He just left.”

  Margaret almost said, “I thought the air smelled cleaner,” but she caught herself. Rupert had dropped his gaze back to his book and did not see her jerk at her mouth as she bit off the words before they could make a sound. “Did I miss luncheon?”

  “No.” Without looking up he put out his hand and struck a little bell on the table. There was a pause, then the slowly advancing noise of footsteps in the kitchen hallway, and presently one of the maids came through with her food. Margaret sat down, spread her napkin on her lap, and for awhile there was no sound in the room but the clink of silverware and the occasional rustle of paper. Rupert seemed withdrawn, quietly occupied, but putting a finger on the pulse of his mood Margaret felt he was almost pleased. She did not know what breed of omen that might be. On occasion there was a chancy look on his face which she was sure he was unaware of, but with the merest flicker of an eyelid, down-turned toward another piece of writing, it would vanish again. Full of food and warm with wine, oddly detached as if the wind had dislodged her from her own body—though the odd pound of her heart still beat through into her mind—she reached out with a question, feeling as if she reached out to touch a wild animal.

  “Who, or what,” she asked, “is the Great Blind Dragon?”

  The wild animal stiffened as if an electric charge had been run through him, then he leapt from his chair and slashed his hand to the side. Papers whirled and shredded from the force of the gesture. Margaret felt as if all the air had been ripped from her lungs. She staggered forward across the table, choking, lungs spasming, burning, her brain’s light wavering for want of breath. Her chair crashed over sideways—she hit the floor with a dull, jarring thud. The world was going grey at the edges. She could not breathe!

  Suddenly Rupert was there, kneeling at her side, and the weight seemed to wrench off her chest. She hauled in breath after breath, each breath clawi
ng her throat like a knife. Her skull was burning. Pain throbbed behind her eyes. She could feel him touching her, trying to help her, but the panic which had filled her mouth came out in a sharp, angry cry and she pushed him away. Sliding, blind, she fell against the upturned wreck of the chair and hung on its arm, gasping, blinking until the world stopped swimming and the burning and throbbing had dulled. Through the sharp lights and greyed blurring on her vision she could see him crouched next to her, arms draped over his knees, fists clenched, jaw thrust out angrily.

  “I’m sorry I lost my temper,” he said gruffly. “You made me angry without warning.”

  “Don’t apologize!” she snapped. The words were dry and hurt in her throat. “You should have thought of that before!” But she knew it was her own fault: she had known, instinctively, that she was asking an impossible question and that he would not like it. All the same, his unguarded fury had given her the answer she had been looking for.

  It filled her with an odd sense of victory.

  With an angry sigh he pushed upward, got an arm under her, and deposited her back into the righted chair. He sat down beside her, withdrawn and quiet. She did not like what she saw in his face. She wanted to leave, to go back to her room or to find the fox, but she dared to do neither.

  “They say the road to hell,” he began at length, “is smooth and trod with ease. That is a lie. It is set at every turn with outposts of the enemy—turn but a stone, and start a wing!—” he laughed harshly, almost self-deprecatingly. “It is only by sheer luck that the small-minded people do not know how close they come to heaven’s doors and yet slip by, by the skin of their teeth. I am not so lucky. I know the war I am in. I know the danger of the road ahead. I have long since counted the cost. It is not an easy road.” His eyes flickered to hers, focused on something beyond them, and flickered away again. Their passing left her skin crawling cold. “Everywhere they lay their traps. Everywhere they wreck my way—in law, in council, in men like Skander and—” he broke off hotly and repositioned himself in the chair as if he sat on a burning coal and must get off it “—in the very soul of me! They have cut me to the quick at times and they are knowing it. Lief I am to throw them off and put them behind me, but a part of me is afraid.”